Physicist and former Nasa astronaut, Dr. Ed Lu, discusses the possible threat that near-Earth asteroids pose to our planet. Lu claims there is a 30% chance of a five mega tonne impact happening this century. He says technologies exist that may prevent impacts to Earth, but without years of advance notice there would be 'no option'.

Reader Comments

The big one has already skimmed the Earth at least three times. It is slowing and it will come down and the impact will be of the order of 100,000 Mt.

If they don't know about it now it should not be too long before they do. If it skims the Earth's atmosphere again without impacting and is "seen" by the media the cover story will be "It was a very near miss - a one off". This is not true, it will come back and it will impact one day and probably this century if not in the next ten years.

We're very lucky is we can go another half a decade in my humble opinion.

The Truth is that the earth has entered a minefield if I may say so. While people focus on big asteroids as related by the media, they tend to ignore that almost 10 fireballs (comets/meteors) are witnessed entering the atmosphere everyday and that the trend is going up exponentially (which is not discussed by the media). The Russian impact for instance was only a "warning" for the times to come, or so I think.

Cometary showers have devastated the earth again and again in the past in a cyclical way. I wouldn't say it's "too late" as it is and has always been inevitable. No action could've had or could ever be taken to prevent this.

The human race is indeed facing extinction once again. But the denial is strong. Wishful thinking does not allow people to look at reality objectively, especially when reality isn't warm, pink, fluffy and comfortable.